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In July 2020, Dr. Kathleen (Kit) Curtius joined UCSD as an Assistant Professor in the Division for Biomedical Informatics, Department of Medicine. She is also an Associate Member of the Cancer Control Program at UCSD Moores Cancer Center. She previously held a Medical Research Council Rutherford Fellowship at Barts Cancer Institute in London UK, where she began as a postdoc in Prof Trevor Graham’s Evolution and Cancer lab in 2016. Before moving to the UK, Dr. Curtius was a Gastroenterology Fellow in the University of Washington (UW) Department of Medicine. She received her PhD in Applied Mathematics from UW in 2015, working with advisor Dr. Georg Luebeck at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, and obtained a BS in Mathematics from UCLA in 2010.

The research aim of her interdisciplinary group, the Quantitative Cancer Control laboratory, is to improve the ability to detect and prevent cancer at the earliest stages. To achieve this, the team develops ways to use mathematical reasoning to better understand the correlations between multi-scale cancer data arising from the underlying process of somatic evolution. Their translational work requires integration with screening guideline committees, clinicians, geneticists, molecular and computational biologists, and other areas that are primed for novel informatics and modeling approaches in cancer control efforts.